(Doorway into the woods. October 2008. Photo © Robin)
When you follow your bliss… doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.
~ Joseph Campbell
Walking & Hiking
(My feet at the Jersey shore. September 2008.)
Why isn’t there a special name for the tops of your feet?
~ Lily Tomlin
Well, you know, I had to do it. I can’t go to the beach without including a post with my feet when I return. Besides, it’s good for the hit count. Heh.
I think I need a new pose, though. This one is getting old. It’s hard to tell one beach-feet photo from another. I thought about trying to capture my feet in the water, but there are far too many good reasons to keep my camera away from the water. (My natural klutziness is the #1 reason.)
For those not familiar with my feet, it all started here.
This post is dedicated to my guide to Torrey Pines, TPGoddess (which, of course, stands for Torrey Pines Goddess).
I’m not going to bother with captions. All of the photos were taken by me at the Torrey Pines State Natural Preserve during the short hike I took with TPG on the Guy Fleming Trail. I wish I could have gone back again to hike some of the other trails during our trip, but they’ll have to wait until our next visit. It’s a gorgeous area and I can see why TPG loves it so.
Torrey Pines is one of those places I wish I could explore over and over again on a daily basis. I can’t imagine ever getting tired of going there as I think the changes over the seasons and over time must be fascinating…
(My feet at the beach. November 2007. © Robin)
Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.
~ Henry David Thoreau
Stevo has been wondering: Where are the feet photos in the blogosphere?
Well, here they are again: My feet. I wonder how well my feet posts will compete with each other in terms of getting the most hits.
One of my favorite feelings in the world is that of my feet in the sand. Mud is good too, but sand is best. Snow isn’t so bad either, now that I think about it. But my feet can’t take a lengthy excursion barefoot in the snow.
This photo reminds me that it might be nice to get a pedicure, even in the midst of winter when my toes rarely make a naked appearance anywhere (mostly in the shower/bath and on the yoga mat these days). My feet could use a little spoiling. They’ve been working hard lately, putting in a lot of mileage in an effort to meet my 2008 walking goal of 1,000 miles.
I almost forgot: The music.
(Longwood Gardens pathway. Photo by Robin. 2007)
The secret of life is in the shadows and not in the open sun; to see anything at all, you must look deeply into the shadow of a living thing.
~ Ute saying
(The body of a tree. Photo by Robin. 2007)
Here in this body are the sacred rivers: here are the sun and moon as well as all the pilgrimage places … I have not encountered another temple as blissful as my own body.~ Saraha
As I slowly approach the age 0f 50 (the turn of the decade occurs in December 2008), I find myself finally (FINALLY!) beginning to feel comfortable in my body. But lately I’ve felt more than comfortable. I’m actually enjoying myself.
I thought, at first, this was a brand new feeling, one I’ve never had before. But then it occurred to me that I must have felt this way as a child. Happy, joyful, glad to be in my own skin.
I haven’t had plastic surgery. I haven’t lost a lot of the weight I need to shed. I still have the aches and pains that come with getting older, various parts beginning to feel a lifetime of usage. I still have to take care with my back injuries.
Perhaps that’s it. The back injuries. The call to action. The decision to honor and care for my body as I wish I had been doing all along.
It’s interesting how life set up this series of coincidences. There have been quieter wake-up calls that I’ve ignored over the past few years. Then I got hit hard with the back problems and being unable to walk. What’s interesting, and coincidental, is that if we’d stayed in the Bogs, hadn’t gone on a sabbatical adventure, I’m not sure I’d have pulled myself out of the dark pit of pain. Well, maybe. Eventually. But the move to a new town with new things to explore forced me to do something while I waited for our insurance to kick in.
My waiting wasn’t passive as it might have been at home. It was an active waiting. A waiting in which I went faithfully to the gym every morning, even when I couldn’t do more than hang on to the rails of the treadmill and shuffle along at 1 mph. Even when all I could do was sit on the bench of the weight machine and hang there, in a kind of sitting traction. Some days the better part of the workout was just getting to the gym. Walking down the hallways, riding down in the elevator, walking down more hallways, opening doors. Those simple acts, things we all take for granted, were often all that I could manage. Sometimes more than I thought I could manage, making me push myself beyond what I perceived to be my limits, limits enforced by pain or by my own thinking.
Then one day I was able to pull down the bar of the lat pulldown machine. I discovered that walking uphill was less painful than a level or downhill course.
I was moving. I was doing. I was being.
I’ve lost a few inches. Weight/strength training will do that to a body. I’ve also lost about 10 lbs. But it’s not the loss of weight or inches that has me enjoying the feel and look of my body.
The change occurred within my soul or spirit or mind or whatever you want to call it.
I sat with my pain, listening to it, encouraging it to tell me what I needed to do next. I learned from it.
And now, now I’m discovering the awesomeness of the human body. The way it can bounce back, if given even half a chance, some nurturing, and some love. The way it can somehow work around the injuries, heal around them in such a way that it’s possible to start feeling normal again.
Cool beans. 🙂
(Peat bog trail at Quail Hollow. Photo by Robin. 2007)
I’ve been spending a lot of time sorting through my photos on the computer. I’m a very lazy photographer in that I haven’t had many of them printed. This sorting business is going to take a long time.
I’ve noticed a trend in my photography, something I might not have noticed if I hadn’t been so lazy and forced to spend an entire day staring at the fruits of my photographic labors. Every group of photos contains at least one shot of a road, a pathway, a river, a window, a gate, or a doorway.
I wonder if that reflects my nature as a Sagittarius. We’re known for having itchy (as in wanting to travel) feet. I do enjoy traveling, that’s for sure. I don’t enjoy the packing and the angst and anxiety (aka fear of flying) I go through getting ready to travel, but the traveling itself is always a fun adventure.
This pathways and portals trend might also be a reflection of my favorite activity: walking and hiking. I like nothing more than to set out on a long walk or hike. I have dreams of going on walking tours where we spend the entire day walking through some countryside or along the coast of any country. Like Forrest Gump and his running, sometimes when I start walking I just want to keep going and going, see where it leads me. Walking is, in my opinion, the best way to travel. It slows you down so you can truly see and enjoy the scenery and the moment. I like having my feet on the ground and in touch with the earth (which might partially explain my fear of flying).
In spending a day looking at a lot of these photos, they also remind me of meditative journeys. I look at the photo and in my mind I begin to wander the path in front of me, letting my spirit lead me where it will. This type of journey opens up whole new worlds for me, when I allow myself the freedom to travel in this way. It’s not always easy to let go, or to feel safe enough to let go. But when I do, oh…what a wonder it is!
I frequently keep this type of photo as my desktop background because these images are so calming to me. But they’re also exciting, because who knows where any pathway or portal may lead?
Man takes root at his feet, and at best he is no more than a potted plant in his house or carriage till he has established communication with the soil by the loving and magnetic touch of his soles to it. Then the tie of association is born; then spring those invisible fibres and rootlets through which character comes to smack of the soil, and which make a man kindred to the spot of earth he inhabits. –JOHN BURROUGHS, The Exhilaration of the Road, Winter Sunshine, 1875
Today I’m focusing on my feet.
Yep, those are my feet, all nice and comfy and warm in the Best Socks in the Universe. Everyone should own a pair of these pampering socks. It is pure bliss, wrapping my feet in these wonderful socks. (They’re made by Gold Toe Socks. I’ve been unable to find them on the internet or I’d link you up to ’em. I bought mine at the Gold Toe Socks outlet store.)
I’ve never been particularly fond of my feet. I’ve certainly never thought of them as pretty feet. I often refer to them as duck feet. No, I don’t have webbed feet. But I do have wide feet. Buying shoes for my wide feet has always been something of a challenge. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have grossly distorted wide feet. You won’t find my feet in Ripley’s Believe It or Not. They are, however, wide enough that buying pretty shoes that actually fit was never much of an option in my younger days. I would squeeze my duck feet into dress shoes and suffer the consequences (pain) for as long as I had to wear them. That made for some long days when I worked in a job that required me to wear a suit or equally professional looking outfits.
And now I’m old enough and wise enough to buy shoes for comfort and fit rather than looks. New Balance shoes are the best. They make them in wide sizes for those of us with duck feet.
These are my feet without the Best Socks in the Universe. My naked feet, in all their glory. Granted, this is a post-pedicure shot, but I wasn’t going to show them in all their frumpy, winter, calloused glory. I’m not quite ready for that yet.
I’m learning to like my feet, to truly appreciate them. They are, after all, carrying the weight of the world. Well, the weight of their world at any rate, which is me and whatever I might be carrying.
My feet are the beginning and ending of me (depending on which way you’re going). I bet my feet were a source of great delight before I could walk on them, providing hours of entertainment as I held them up in the air or tried to put them in my mouth. “This little piggy” must have been played on those toes hundreds of times. My feet have been tickled more times than I care to count. They’re not very ticklish feet, by the way. You have to know the secret to tickling my feet in order to get a good tickled reaction. No, I’m not revealing the secret. Dream on.
My feet bring me into direct contact with the earth, one step at a time. I love being barefoot. My feet were born to be naked, all exposure, all the time. My feet love me when they’re naked. I love my feet when they’re naked. I like the feel of cold tile, plush carpet, green grass, warm or cool sand, mud, dirt, and even concrete. When I was much, much younger I had feet tough enough to walk over any surface because I spent most of my summer days running around without shoes.
There was study from Rush Medical College, Chicago, published in the September 2006 issue of Arthritis and Rheumatism that suggests adults with osteoarthritis benefit by going barefoot. Findings “suggest that modern shoes may exacerbate the abnormal biomechanics of lower extremity OA,” and that “modern shoes, and perhaps our daily walking practices, may need to be reevaluated with regard to their effects on the prevalence and progression of OA.”
See? Even science agrees. Barefoot is best.
My feet take me places. I often wonder how many miles my feet have walked and hiked. In almost 50 years, they’ve gotten around the block, as they say, much more than once, that’s for sure. I walked over 700 miles last year and that’s just the mileage I kept track of during my walking workouts. Who knows how many more miles I walked doing things like shopping, cleaning house, visiting museums, walking around at work (where I was on my feet all day), meandering around the pond?
My feet balance me. They keep me grounded.
Now that I’ve taken the time to think about them, my feet are amazing.
I am grateful for my amazing feet, for all the miles they’ve walked, for all the places they’ve taken me, for all the standing around they’ve put up with, and for allowing me to stay in touch with Mother Earth.
Thank you, feet. Maybe you’re not terribly pretty feet, but you sure are beautiful.
(Photo by Robin. Quail Hollow. 2006)
Above all, do not lose your desire to walk. Every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness. I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it … if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.
–SOREN KIERKEGAARD, Danish philosopher, 1813-55
(January 2006. Photo by Robin)
“Antisthenes says that in a certain faraway land the cold is so intense that words freeze as soon as they are uttered, and after some time then thaw and become audible, so that words spoken in winter go unheard until the next summer.” — Plutarch, Moralia
Early morning in Quail Hollow. The LovelyMan and I are hiking along the woodlands path, following it up the hill and then down into the hollow where it connects with the peat bog pathway and boardwalk. The woods are still, frozen in quiet on this wintry morning. The only sound is that of our footsteps crunching on the frozen leaves which cover the path.
Our words don’t freeze, but our breaths do, crystalizing as we exhale. My nose feels frozen from the inside out and my cheeks are numb. I’m thankful for the layers of clothing I put on, starting with the thermal undergarments, because other than my extremities, I’m pretty toasty. The hiking keeps me warm, too.
We reach the boardwalk and I see that things aren’t as still and quiet as I’d thought. There are raccoon prints everywhere on the boardwalk, going in all directions. The prints are still wet, standing out on the frosty wood of the boardwalk. Raccoons are nocturnal animals. This one must have been late in going to bed for the day, perhaps dousing (as raccoons will do) one last snack before settling in to sleep.
I look, hoping to catch a glimpse of the masked and dexterous creature. It is said that masks are powerful and magical tools, and that the curious raccoon is a master of disguise and transformation.
I wonder what power and magic the raccoon brought to these woods on this frosty morn. We follow in the footsteps of the raccoon, walking along the boardwalk until we are led back into the mystery of the woods.
Bountiful Healing 